Sunday, January 19, 2003

I honored the rule about keeping confidences," says Frum, 42. He also honored the rule, he says, "of keeping the president's thinking confidential as he's thinking it." (It's unclear, however, how familiar the author was with the president's thinking. Asked how many one-on-one meetings he had with the president, Frum says there were "six or eight." But when pressed to exclude walk-by encounters in the hallways, the total falls to "two or three.")

He has fleshy pale cheeks, bright brown eyes and an eager bearing that leaves the impression of an overgrown boy. Frum is sitting in his office at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a resident fellow. He is surrounded by stacked boxes of "The Right Man." Speaking in a smooth, NPR-perfect voice, he has completed 17 radio interviews by lunchtime. He began at 6 a.m. and will be finished by midnight.

Frum is attempting what is probably an impossible balancing act: He wants to "speak truthfully about what I saw" at the White House while still hoping for the administration's love. He observes from outside the sanctum but still promises an "inside account." He is a self-described "minor player" who still feels qualified to write that Secretary of State Colin Powell is the "deadliest bureaucratic knife fighter in the whole Bush administration."

All of which has made him a figure of some disdain, both within and beyond the Bush circle. This is manifest in a classic Washington form: Conversations with people who know Frum begin with on-the-record praise and spiral into on-background ridicule. "There's a sort of desperate edge to David's need to be noticed," says one well-known conservative who knows Frum and has ties to the White House. Frum has an outsider's zealousness for recognition, he says. In addition to still being a Canadian citizen, Frum was also one of the few Jews in the Bush White House, a point of which he seems acutely conscious.

As Julia pithily observes: Shame no-one in the White House realized what a loser this guy was before he set our foreign policy, isn't it?